Mayor Gregor Robertson taken to task over Vancouver’s response to snowfall

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Critics of Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson are calling for a formal inquiry into the city's response to a bout of winter weather that has left residents frustrated by streets and sidewalks blanketed by ice – as the region prepares for yet another snowfall.

Many residents have expressed frustration that a number of side streets and sidewalks have yet to be plowed, sanded or salted after several dumps of snow and weeks of freezing temperatures. Earlier this week, the city promised more staff would be deployed and offered free salt at some Vancouver fire halls, which was quickly snapped up.

"The mayor and the city should have taken this more seriously," said Councillor George Affleck, a member of the opposition Non-Partisan Association, or NPA. "We need to have someone from the outside to come in and take a look at why can't we get a handle on this."

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Mr. Affleck said he and fellow NPA Councillor Melissa De Genova put forward a motion calling for a review.

Ms. De Genova said the city needs to be prepared for extreme weather, however unusual, in the same way it prepares for earthquakes.

"The city hired an entire team dedicated to get prepared for earthquakes and local emergencies," she said. "I know this weather doesn't happen in Vancouver every year, then how about the earthquake? No, we still prepare for it."

Councillor Raymond Louie of the mayor's Vision Vancouver party says the NPA is "playing politics."

"They are doing this rather than going out to help people," said Mr. Louie, who added city staff are working around the clock to address the situation.

The city was hit with the first of several snowfalls in mid-December, when staff struggled to deal with the volume of calls from residents.

According to data released by the city, Vancouver's 311 service received 1,712 calls related to snow removal last month, compared with just 68 during the same period in 2013, the last year that the area had a long period of snowfall. During the busiest days, fewer than half of calls were answered within the city's own targets and as many as 20 per cent of callers simply hung up while they waited.

The city issued a news release Thursday saying it was prepared for snow expected on Friday and is stocked with salt.

Outside Vancouver, every municipality is scrambling to stay ahead of what engineers and public-works managers say has been one of the the most difficult winters in memory. Some have promised changes as a result of complaints or the unusually bad conditions.

In Delta, Mayor Lois Jackson said she has made a commitment that all local roads will be sanded and salted by Friday, when another snowfall is due. Ms. Jackson said the city had been doing well up until New Year's Eve, when a heavy snowfall combined with a warming then freezing turned many secondary roads into "ice slicks," as she put it. After that, she started hearing complaints from people, especially after three or four days of being unable to get off their local streets.

In Richmond, Mayor Malcolm Brodie said council may take a second look at its bylaw requiring businesses and apartment owners to shovel their sidewalks, but not single-family homeowners. They had been exempted in the past, he said, because of a concern about penalizing older people who might find that task hard. Now, he said, council might reconsider that. "We'll take a look at the record this year."

In Burnaby, trucks were spreading brine Thursday on major routes in preparation for the sixth snowfall of the winter.

Brian Carter, Burnaby's manager of public-works operations, said this winter snow has been far worse than the 2008 snowfall that was a wake-up call for many municipalities.

"There was a lot of snow in 2008," but it was mostly one big snowfall at the beginning, he said, "not five or six events a couple of days apart where you then have a freeze and thaw and then bleed water that refreezes the road."

Mr. Carter said it has been impossible to do many local roads because Burnaby, like every other Lower Mainland municipality, buys only enough snow equipment to clear priority roads within 24 hours of one of the region's rare snowfalls. "So if you don't get to a local road within 24 to 48 hours, everyone drives over it and compacts it."

Frances Bula is a freelance writer